On today’s date in 1946, the octogenarian German composer Richard Strauss conducted the final rehearsal of his latest work, a study for 23 strings entitled “Metamorphosen.” Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and music patron, had commissioned “Metamorphosen,” and conducted the public premiere later that day in Zurich.

Strauss had begun work on this piece during the final days of WW II, on March 13, 1945, to be exact, one day after the Vienna State Opera house had been hit by Allied bombs. When the Nazis had come to power in 1933, Strauss was at first fêted as the greatest living German composer, but he soon fell out of favor. While his music was not banned, official Nazi support for Strauss eventually fell away, and the fact that Strauss’ beloved daughter-in-law was Jewish meant increasingly anxiety about her fate and that of the Strauss grandchildren as the Nazi’s race laws tightened their noose.

In a post-war memorandum Strauss wrote, “The most terrible period of human history has come to an end, the 12-year reign of bestiality, ignorance, and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom and irreplaceable monuments of architecture and works of art were destroyed.”

“Metamorphosen” is Strauss’ intensely personal threnody for a national culture swallowed up in a catastrophe of collective guilt and mass destruction.